It takes a very special person to label the photographed, documented, filmed and studied phenomenon of mass coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef "fake news".

You need lashings of chutzpah, blinkers the size of Donald Trump's hairspray bill and more hubris than you can shake a branch of dead coral at.

It also helps if you can hide inside the bubble of the hyper-partisan Breitbart media outlet, whose former boss is the US president's chief strategist.

So our special person is Britain's James Delingpole who, when he's not denying the impacts of coral bleaching, is denying the science of human-caused climate change, which he says is "the biggest scam in the history of the world".

Delingpole was offended this week by an editorial in the Washington Post that read: "Humans are killing the Great Barrier Reef, one of the world's greatest natural wonders, and there's nothing Australians on their own can do about it. We are all responsible."

Delingpole wrote: "Like the thriving polar bear, like the recovering ice caps, like the doing-just-fine Pacific islands, the Great Barrier Reef has become a totem for the liberal-left not because it's in any kind of danger but because it's big and famous and photogenic and lots and lots of people would be really sad if it disappeared. But it's not going to disappear. That's just a #fakenews lie designed to promote the climate alarmist agenda."

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"Is the Great Barrier Reef dying due to climate change caused by man's selfishness and greed?" asks Delingpole, before giving a long list of people and groups who he thinks will answer yes, including "the Guardian" and "any marine biologist".

"Have they been out there personally - as I have - to check. No of course not," says Delingpole.

Turns out he was there once, briefly, in 2012. Obviously the latest bleaching was in 2016 and (now) 2017. And is very well documented.

Who even made the rule that we cannot group ducks and fish together for the simple reason that they are both aquatic? If I want to group them that way and it serves my purpose then I can jolly well do it however I want to and it is still a nested hierarchy and you can't tell me that it's not.